Just Under the Clouds

by Melissa Sarno

  “I’m sorry—I don’t—” But I don’t know what to say, don’t know why we’re here, so I just grab at Adare’s wrist. She shakes her head and stomps her foot and the boat wavers slightly. She points at those stupid chimes again, not knowing the word, or knowing it but not wanting to say.

  Mrs. Griffin smiles. “Cora. Adare. It’s so good of you to stop by.”

  There’s the vague smell of fish. The boat is murky and damp. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” Sabina says, and I can’t tell whether she’s happy I’m here or not.

  I look from Adare, all wild and dirty and stomping and whining, to Sabina, in her pretty puff skirt and boots, quietly doing her schoolwork. “No, we’ve got to go. Adare is just…” I’m not sure how to explain.

  “We’ve got graham crackers.” Mrs. Griffin motions toward the pantry. “Cinnamon.”

  “No, it’s okay. We need to go.”

  But Adare will not move. She’s staring at the chimes. Something about them has caught her attention—their sparkle, their sound. I don’t know, have never known, what it means to live inside Adare’s mind.

  “I think it’s your chimes,” I tell them, my face getting more and more red. “She wants to see them, hear them—I don’t know.”

  I move toward the chimes and let my fingers slip through the glass. The sound shimmers. As they ring, Adare runs her own fingers through them. She circles them as the glass catches the small hints of sun.

  The sound ripples again. Even Mrs. Griffin looks on in wonder and surprise. She talks to Adare gently, like a teacher. “The chimes sound when the water’s choppy,” she tells her. “When it storms.”

  I try to imagine this boat in a storm. The swell and flicker of never-ending chimes. I remember Daddy talking about rainfall, not the good kind the earth needs but the bad kind, the kind that can ruin everything.

  “Is that all you wanted?” I ask Adare. “To hear them?”

  “The crows,” she says like everyone will understand.

  “Who?” Mrs. Griffin asks.

  “The crows,” she repeats.

  “Oh, crows.” Mrs. Griffin encourages her. “Yes. They do like shiny things.”

  I think of all the trinkets the crows left Adare, all of them silver and shining, and I realize as the chimes shimmer and ripple, dancing their light across the walls, I need to do a better job of trying to understand.

  I reach my hand out to Adare and say to the Griffins, “I’m sorry.” Then I shrug, like it can’t be helped, because nothing about us can. “We didn’t mean to barge in.”

  Before they can say anything more, before Sabina can try to even catch my eye, I look down, fast, and Adare and I dip our heads to fit through the little door.

  The next day, I walk to remedial math with my washed-away a from all those days ago, with all the missing letters that should be numbers. I take a deep breath as I round a corner in the halls, preparing to let Ms. Vitiello know that when she asked the other morning, I should have been going one way: to her class.

  As I’m running over it in my head, I hear the shimmer of dangling bracelets. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I swear I’m walking straight at Meredith Crane again. The girl is blowing up her bangs like a steam engine.

  “Yes,” I sigh, and say, before she can, “I’m off to remedial. Don’t go on about it.”

  “Long as Ms. Vitiello knows what a name-calling fool you are.”

  I shake my head and keep walking until something in me can’t let it go. “You know, Meredith, sometimes you’ve got to work at a thing. It doesn’t come natural. For example, math,” I say.

  “Okay, like, what are you, some kind of philosopher?”

  I keep going. “Or being nice. Sometimes you have to work at that. If I were you, I’d start trying.”

  She looks like she’s about to shoot her mouth off again, but then I watch her clamp it shut. She slides her bracelets up and down her arm, adjusts her backpack, and turns away.

  I walk to class, planning what I’ll say to Ms. Vitiello about Meredith Crane getting the best of me the other day when she shouldn’t have, about needing to get on track because of my circumstances. But when I walk in, she’s got a smile so soft, it could be Adare’s, and she talks before I do.

  “Cora Quinn,” she states, and I nod. “This where you’re supposed to be?”

  I look around at all the kids, one clacking a pencil like a drumstick against the metal desk, another looking so far out the window, it’s like she’s not even here. A little bit like Adare. A little bit like me. “Yes,” I say. “And I’m sorry, Ms. Vitiello. The other day—”

  She waves her hand. She makes it seem like she knows already, like she even knew that day. “You can call me Ms. Alice.” She surveys me through the space above the dip of her glasses. “I do things a little differently than Mrs. Belz,” she tells me. “I have different rules.”

  Rules. I don’t like the sound of that.

  “The first is that I don’t ask the questions in this room. You do.”

  I’m quiet, despite feeling confused. But I nod fast.

  “You’ll see how it works.” Then the bell rings and everyone shuffles in and I try not to think about how I miss Sabina’s wailing boots or even Meredith Crane’s clanking eraser. I pull out my Tree Book and quickly survey the new view from here.

  It’s the first day of spring.

  “Shall we begin?” She looks to us for approval and Yeses murmur their way across the room.

  Her chalk on the board is easy and looping as she writes out equations.

  I make sure to pay attention. I make sure not to look off and away.

  Her hand swirls across the board, creating a small, simple, numberless equation: a + b = c.

  Then she turns, places her hand on her hip, and looks at us. The quiet has this kind of wonder in it as she scans the room. “Someone ask the first question.”

  No one budges.

  “I’ll give you a hint. It’s easiest to start from the end. Start backward.”

  The girl who was staring out the window throws her hand up in the air. “What’s c?”

  Ms. Alice erases c and makes it a 6. Then she boomerangs her chalk back, pointing at us.

  “What’s b?” someone calls out.

  Ms. Alice erases the b and makes it a 4.

  What’s a? My heart thumps, but I don’t call out and Ms. Alice has already moved on. “We have our first facts,” she tells us. “a = 2 and b = 4.”

  She writes this down, setting it up in the corner with a squiggle cloud around each, like we’ve solved the first piece of a puzzle. “Keep track,” she tells us. “In your notes. Of the facts.”

  And we play this way for the rest of the class, everyone calling out questions while Ms. Alice gives us answers, assigning numbers to letters. I watch chalk markings disappear with the quick swipe of her eraser. I watch every letter become a number. I watch the facts fill up on the side of the board in their squiggle clouds. It feels like a game, throwing out questions, erasing letters, assigning numbers, and gaining a fact.

  Then Ms. Alice writes a long equation across the board, an impossible string of letters and numbers, longer than any equation Mrs. Belz ever gave us.

  She turns to us, hand-hipped, her smile pink and easy. “Now,” she says. “I need each of you to find a. Write it down with your name on a slip of paper and hand it to me when the bell rings.”

  I stare back in disbelief.

  “You have all the facts. You gave them to me.”

  I scan the running, messy string. I keep an eye on the squiggle clouds.

  “There are no secrets in algebra. There are no tricks. Just puzzles. Just tricky ways of arranging. Everything you need is right there.”

  I stare at the equation. Letters and
numbers. Parentheses. Squares. I realize that for every empty letter, there’s a way of filling it up if I start with Ms. Alice’s first hint. Start backward.

  When it clicks, it clicks, Mom said. And the answer comes, quick and fast, my pencil scrawling across the lined paper, threatening to fly off onto the desk because there isn’t enough room—there’s never enough room—for the long, rattling takeoff of a thing growing. And when I reach a kind of end, which is really a beginning, I know exactly what a is.

  Before I place the number 7 on a small square of paper, I draw it in my palm first. I stare at it, the number 7, with its leaning straight stalk and its flying leaf. I close it and keep it. Found.

  After mucking in the dirt and drizzling rain while climbing street trees, I hold on to Adare with one hand and the 7 in my other palm. I can’t wait to explain to Mom how it’s a number for a letter I never thought I’d find, how I sent myself backward to work ahead. I want to tell her about the tree of heaven, about Anju, how she’s an artist just like Mom is. Like maybe I am, too.

  When the elevator doors slide open, I don’t have to scan the little gold letters anymore to Willa’s. I know how we turn the corners and pass the sparkling mirrors that guide us straight toward it. I know how 12B has a pair of tall rain boots slumped over by the door. I wait for the waft of Willa’s coconut soap, which has this way of slipping through the air to the hallway.

  But when we get there, the smell is muffled and the door’s wide open and I see a bag propping it up.

  We walk in and Willa stands with arms crossed. “Does it have to be such a whirlwind?”

  “This is how we live, Willa.” Mom smiles at us and I watch her zip up an old knapsack. My stomach flutters with knowing and I wonder if I should even take my backpack off.

  Adare runs dirt across the floor toward Mom and wraps her arms around her waist in a big hug. I stand at the door, watching our things evolve into neat piles.

  “Tilda’s found us a new placement in Red Hook,” she tells me.

  Placement. I hate the word. Like we’re a rubber band in a junk drawer, being shoved into someplace no one else wants to be.

  Everything in me tightens and I feel like I can’t move, like I have to stand beside the doorframe, between the hallway and Willa’s, because if I step forward or backward, I’ll scream. So I just start with a slow shake of my head, the whisper of my No battering down the door to my chest, trying to escape.

  “You can stay here,” Willa tells her.

  “We can’t.”

  “At least think about Jade’s school. Jade says she can pull a few strings, get Adare in. It’s a good school, Liana. She’ll do it as a favor. For me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she says. “Of course.”

  Adare’s butterfly wings are folded in half. They sit on the plumped-up quilt. I have the urge to rip them apart, to spread the quilt out and crumple myself beneath it, with the fabric at my ears the way we puff up Adare’s sheets, inside a place that’s dark and small and safe and mine.

  I wonder why Willa couldn’t keep her nose out of our business, quit worrying about special schools and MetroCards.

  As Mom unravels from Adare’s embrace, she sees the tracks of mud. She sees Adare’s ankles, gray dirt caked at the fold of her socks, and her leggings soaked straight through. “You’re a filthy mess,” she tells her, and Adare starts giggling. Then she looks to me. “You both are.”

  I say nothing. I stay tight-lipped, the way Adare does when she doesn’t feel like answering or doing her homework or explaining herself out of the old patches of dirt we get ourselves in.

  “You know I don’t like you climbing in the rain.”

  I close my eyes and wait behind their shuttered walls. I want a snack from the refrigerator. I want to press my nose against the cold glass and stare out at the tugboats, down into the tops of the trees. I imagine myself falling through the glass and down onto the canopy, nesting myself in strands of soft leaves.

  I hear Mom’s feet scamper toward the kitchen, hear the roll of paper towels as she rips a few sheets off. “We should get cleaned up before we leave. I don’t know what—” But she stops herself and I listen to all she doesn’t say. She doesn’t know what we’ll find when we get to where nobody else wants to be. She doesn’t know what will be ours. She doesn’t know anything.

  “I’ll give Adare a bath. Wash your hands. Get together your clothes. In a pile. Neat,” she scolds before she needs to.

  Adare giggles.

  I don’t move.

  “Come on, Cora. I’d like to get going.”

  I don’t open my eyes. I don’t say all I want to say. No. No. I want to stay here.

  Instead, I ask what I really want to know, with my eyes still closed and my voice quiet. “Why are you making us leave?”

  “This place is Willa’s,” she tells me. “Not ours.”

  I listen as Adare’s laughter plows down the hallway toward the bathroom, then open my eyes to the room and our batches of things.

  Mom follows Adare, and I squat to the floor, take my filthy hands and shovel my clothes into my backpack while Willa looks on. I don’t want to let her eyes meet mine.

  “You okay?” Willa asks.

  I don’t answer.

  “You can visit, you know. Anytime you want.”

  I pull at the zipper, but it’s broken and won’t budge.

  “I was the first in my family to go to college. Heck, your mother and I were the first in our families to leave the state.”

  I don’t know why it matters, why she’s telling me this. I’m tugging at the zipper, trying to yank it closed.

  “What I’m saying is, you have to go beyond your experience to find out what you need and where you belong. And then, even when you do, you’re still figuring it out.”

  I push my bunched-up clothes to the bottom of the backpack and try to cinch it closed with my fist.

  “Your mother and I, we’re more alike than you might think. We’re people who go looking.”

  I smack the bag down and watch the clothes spill over as Willa takes my shoulders. She shifts me around, looks me in the eyes. “There’s no one place, Cora. Remember that.”

  When she lets go, I say, “There has to be.”

  She takes my hand in hers. “Don’t worry,” she tells me. “Someday you’ll see.”

  Our placement, Mom says, is not a shelter. It’s real housing for people like us who don’t have much but are trying to work steady. It’s west of the canal in Red Hook. I can tell because we ride along the river, looking out with Manhattan on our right. This place pushes out toward the harbor, at the hook of Brooklyn, and we have to take the B61 bus.

  I haven’t said a word since we walked out of Willa’s, our entire world shoved into bags, like always, slung over our shoulders, dragged from one sad place to the next. When we leave, I feel like a slotted spoon, losing all its drippings, left with only thick, gross chunks. Willa said goodbye and told us she couldn’t wait to come visit. She and Mom hugged as Mom whispered a thank-you and her hand slipped from her heart.

  I know this is the way we do things. I know this is how we leave our mark. We leave places empty. We leave them so it’s like we’ve never been anywhere.

  We sit on the blue seats of the bus and pass the old warehouses on the docks, the metal fences, the overgrown grass, still brown and left over from last winter. There are buildings with the windows gone and there’s a cruise ship with its nose nudging the edge of the harbor and there aren’t so many trees, just the gray horizon at the slapping water, holding on to the sun before it sets.

  “You’ll stay in school,” Mom tells me, “at least until the end of the year. So you don’t have to worry about that.”

  I hadn’t worried. I hadn’t let myself. I assumed I’d be sent somewhere new—and what would it matter? I don’t have anyo
ne here.

  I stay quiet. I practice at being Adare.

  I try not to let myself think of Willa, but I do. I let myself remember how she wanted us and held on to a piece of who Mom used to be. Now we’ve left it behind. What happens to that piece?

  I fold my arms tighter at my chest and feel the dirt under my fingernails. My hair is still tangled wet with rain. I refused to shower, even though it may have been my last chance. And it’s that thought, of all things, that makes my eyes sting, but I press my arms closer to my chest, like I’m holding on to my insides, begging them to stay put.

  I hate that the bus makes loud, squealing sounds as we round corners. I hate that we have to pull the black cord if we want it to stop. I like the subway to Willa’s better.

  When we get to our stop, Mom reaches for both our hands, but Adare’s clutching Sookie and I pull mine away. I wish I’d smudged the 7 on my palm because I don’t want to share it. I shift my bag from one hand to the other, wrapping my 7 around it.

  I don’t look at trees. I don’t want to place us here.

  Mom looks up to the sky. “Good. We’ll get there before dark.”

  She holds tight to Adare and I hold tight to a bag of things that don’t even feel like my own.

  We make our way to a crown of buildings that don’t look any different from Ennis House. There might not be an Old Lou, but in the crisscross paths of the courtyard there are people with lost stares, leaning on the empty bicycle racks and against the building.

  The doors are heavy, and like Ennis House, the halls are dim. The walls peel their layers of blue and gray paint. The steel railings of the staircase are spattered brown. As I prepare to climb the steps, Mom points at a narrow tan door. “Come on—we’ll take the elevator.”

  It’s not like Willa’s. We open the door like it’s a cubby, and we step into the filthy box, which smells like urine and old sweat. When Mom presses 3, a set of brass-looking bars scratch closed and it sounds like a broken machine trying to do something that doesn’t need to be done. At the third floor, the bars slide back and disappear, and we push open the door and step into the hall.